Chinese in a Flash, Vol. 1 (Tuttle Flash Cards)

Despite what others have said, these have a 2003 copyright and have Simplified/Traditional + stokes on the one side; and on the other sid there are a few examples and a few uses of the character in different compounds.

Pros:
1) I like the size because they are portable and they seem to give you many of the most frequent characters.

2) I am using T'ung and Pollards colloquial Chinese and on chapter 14/17, I have been able to use about 3/4ths of the cards.

3) These cards are a) a cheaper than many othes and b) you can expand them more than any other set by adding volumes 2,3,4 which will give you about 1800 characters total.

Cons:
1) Use: The translation is on the top left corner along with the small version of the character so you need to cover the character with your thumb and try not to look at the rest of the card if you want to use them in reverse.

2) Use: would have been nice to list the character's type (i.e.: M, SV, V, MV, ...).

3) Customer Service: I seem to have lost the 16-page booklet which allows you to look up the characters by number. Although I emailed Tuttle a couple of weeks ago to see if I could get a PDF of the 16 page booklet, they have not responded.

These are handy if you are trying to learn Chinese characters. You can sort them out as you learn them so the pile of known characters gets bigger and bigger. They have useful phrases on them to put the words in context.

These cards look impressive, but they have one noticeable flaw. On the front side of the cards, they only have the Chinese characters, and not pinyin. This flaw is unfortunately fatal for beginners and even many intermediates. For many novices, pinyin/conversational Chinese comes first, followed by characters over time.

For those who want to focus on conversational Chinese (and have no/limited interest in written character Chinese), I would recommend "Speak in a Week! Flash! Chinese 1001 Cards" as a better alternative. They have BOTH characters and pinyin on the front, and simple definition on the back. Even better, the cards are colored differently for nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs (colors have been shown to help with memory).

Note: On Amazon, "Speak in a Week! Chinese" is listed as being available in Feb. 2008, but I just picked them up for myself in Borders (Nov. 2007).

+ Fairly sturdy and large text
+ Includes traditional and simplified on the "front"
+ Radicial is stated on back for easier lookup in dictionary
+ Numbered to help gauge progress

- Only simplified version for phrases, sample sentence, stroke order
- Definitions are a little short to fully understand some words
- Should/must have a basic understanding of the 4 or 5 sounds used in Chinese (otherwise the characters will be very hard to remember)
- Cannot be the ONLY tool used to learn Chinese; need some way to "hear" the words with the correct pronunciation

= One of the best tools to start learning Chinese. Great time saver (don't need to make my own flash cards). I wish there was a traditional and simplified version, or that all phrases and samples also had traditional side, but I'm learning a lot of simplified characters that I had not intended to.
= Recommend shuffling them to eliminate use of context clues or ordering when testing yourself.
= MUST HAVE for character recognition; only by repetition and review will reading Chinese become natural and effortless.

If you are starting to learn Chinese, this is what you need. Chinese characters are difficult to learn but these flashcards make it a lot easier. You can take some cards with you to review wherever you go and in no time you will realise you know a lot of characters. Each card is full of information: the character (simplified and traditional) ,how to write it, pronounciation in pinyin, meaning, radical, examples, etc. Do not hesitate to buy it: you will not regret your choice.